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Ursula Perez, 8, works with her mother Penny Perez in the class. Linguist Dr. Richard Applegate teaches "Coast Miwok" to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria at their offices in Santa Rosa. John Storey Santa Rosa Event on 8/20/05
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TribalLauguage_jrs_0282.jpg
Ursula Perez, 8, works with her mother Penny Perez in the class. Linguist Dr. Richard Applegate teaches "Coast Miwok" to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria at their offices ... more

Photo: John Storey

SANTA ROSA / Keeping languages alive / Students learn the words of their American Indian ancestors

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At the headquarters of the Graton Rancheria in a sprawling Santa Rosa business park, linguist Richard Applegate held up a stuffed dog and asked in Coastal Miwok:

"What is being held? Who is holding the dog? What is the dog doing?"

"You guys are doing really good," Applegate said as his students responded with flowing, melodic words, the language spoken by their grandparents but lost to them until now.

His lessons are based in part on tapes that Sarah Ballard, the last fluent speaker of Coastal Miwok, recorded four years before she died in 1978 at age 96.

"Don't get too proud of us yet," said Carolyn Peri-McNulte, 61, of Benicia, a granddaughter of Ballard.

The students are among a growing number of American Indians across California reviving their languages and cultures in a race against time as the last few native speakers of many of the languages are now elderly. The students see Applegate's class as an important first step toward reclaiming their cultural identity, much as Hawaiians have strengthened their culture with publicly funded language classes, and Israel solidified its national identity by reviving Hebrew.

Peri-McNulte asked the word for "gift," which wasn't in the dictionary her grandmother's recordings contributed to. Perhaps together they could figure it out, Applegate said, working from the root of the verb "to give."

"No one would know if we were wrong," she said with a rueful chuckle.

Having learned Italian, her father's family's language, Peri-McNulte, who wore a black T-shirt that read "Homeland Security, Fighting Terrorism since 1492" over a photo of American Indian warriors, said she wants to give equal attention to Coastal Miwok.

The class revives what was lost, said Penny Lopez, who lives in nearby Windsor.

"We need it back, for our future," Lopez said. Her daughter, Ursula, 8, also in the class, corrects her when she's wrong and likes to sing songs in Coastal Miwok.

"It's fun to say the words," said Ursula, who had a ponytail sprouting from the top of her head.

The two dozen students taking the class one Saturday afternoon each month range from Ursula to a man wearing a traditional abalone-shell necklace to a woman with a walker.

California's Indians spoke 115 language and dialect groups in 1770. Of those, only 50 languages remain, each with only a few speakers, and tribe members are working to sustain 25 others. "What I hear the most is from tribal people is that we're losing our culture. Most of us are not full blood anymore. We don't have something that shows who we are, and language is a big part of it," said Leanne Hinton, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley and a founding member of Vallejo's Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, a nonprofit that pairs fluent speakers with willing learners.

After more than a century of forced assimilation starting in the late 1800s, during which Indian children were sent to boarding schools and often punished for speaking their native tongue, many Indians lost interest in passing on their language and traditions. But in response to various English-only movements across the United States, Indians supported legislation, passed in 1990, requiring the federal government fund efforts to preserve native languages. Since then, tribes have tapped gambling money and public and private funding for language programs. The Pechanga Band in Southern California, for instance, incorporates Luiseño into daily lessons in preschool through first-grade classes.

In Santa Rosa, once a core group of people learns to speak Coastal Miwok, tribal leaders hope to start language classes for children. One tribe member in Applegate's class, Tim Molino of Berkeley, in addition to studying Coastal Miwok takes individual lessons in Kashaya. It was the language of his paternal grandmother, who was half Kashaya and half Coastal Miwok.

Hoping to reconnect with his culture after his parents died, he studied Kashaya word lists he found in an archive at UC Berkeley and teamed with his father's cousin, Anita Silva, in 2001.

They immerse themselves in the language for several hours each week, making small talk about daily life -- passing on vocabulary in context. For example, he studies with her at mealtimes because it involves lots of opportunities for short questions and answers.

Molino is finishing a bachelor's degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley and eventually wants to help other American Indians regain their language. He and Silva have begun teaching a monthly Kashaya class at Lytton Rancheria, and he has also provided Stewarts Point Rancheria with language materials.

Silva, 74, of Santa Rosa still collects acorns each fall to make traditional bread and fries seaweed, just as she learned as a child on remote Stewarts Point. She feels some urgency in teaching Indians who want to regain a sense of their culture.

"Every generation will lose something. I taught my kids, 'Know who you are.' But if we don't work with people like Tim, we are going to lose it entirely," said Silva, a short, soft woman full of sassy laughter.

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